


manunkind

by legete



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Captivity, Community: trope_bingo, Escape, Gen, Handcuffs, Human Experimentation, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-11
Updated: 2013-04-11
Packaged: 2017-12-08 04:18:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/756950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/legete/pseuds/legete
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three times he nearly escapes. Two of them are critical-thinking tests. The third is legitimate--he shakes off whatever drugs they’ve put in his food, breaks a guard’s nose, and makes it to another floor before they shoot him full of enough tranquilizers to drop a horse. The last thing he sees is boots running across carpet toward him. </p><p>They’re more careful after that.</p><p>[An AU where Steve Rogers isn't found by SHIELD and Bruce Banner isn't quite as good at keeping his head low.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	manunkind

**Author's Note:**

> Steve and Bruce have basically been captured by the private sector for research into serum reproduction. This is about as pleasant as one would expect. It was written for my trope bingo space "handcuffed/bound together."
> 
> Thanks to zekkass for once again cheerleading, betaing, and flat-out bribing this fic into existence.

The plane screams around him as he points it down toward the ice; it bucks and shakes and fights, trying to throw him off. The muscles of his arms burn with the strain of keeping it in a nosedive. He’d never thought dying would be so hard, but maybe acceptance comes easier to some than others.

For the first time, he wishes he hadn’t been the one given that miracle serum. He wishes it was skinny, sickly Steve Rogers riding this ugly thing to eternity, because then maybe Erskine’s supersoldier could still be out there on the battlefield where he belongs. It’s not his only regret--Peggy’s voice over the radio and the flashes of Bucky falling that he sees every time he closes his eyes prove that--but it’s one of the strongest. He’s afraid of death. He won’t lie about it; he’s afraid of going alone into that darkness. But he’s not sorry to die for his country. He’s only sorry that he’s taking away a resource by doing so.

In the last moment, the very last moment, when there’s no chance the plane can pull itself back up, he closes his eyes, like a dreamer would, like a coward would, and he lets himself imagine Peggy Carter in her red dress, just waiting for him.

He never feels the impact.

\--

Death is dark and cold and blue and endless. 

Death is unfathomable groans and cataclysmic cracks, the ghosts of metal warping punctuated by the bright sound of glass shattering. 

Death is suffocating forever, lungs trapped half-filled.

\--

A man’s voice.

_What is your name?_

His tongue is too thick and he is too cold. He blinks stupidly up at an outline that’s haloed by a light. It’s bright, it’s too bright, and every nerve ending in his body is screaming in pain.

_What is your name?_

He doesn’t know where he is, he doesn’t know what’s happening. The noise he makes is guttural.

 _He’s a fuckin’ retard,_ somebody else says, outside his field of vision. _Brain’s freezer-burnt. How much did we even pay for this guy--_

He sinks back to darkness.

\--

They never do tell him where he is.

He wakes up the second time in a lit room. The walls are beige. The carpet is beige. There are no windows.

 _Hello,_ a voice says, from a speakerbox in the corner of the ceiling.

The questions are simple at first, and he doesn’t see why he shouldn’t answer.. Name, age--he knows these things. After that they grow more complex. Level of education. Natural talents. Political affiliations. Why he volunteered for the serum. What he was told about the serum.

How to replicate the serum.

When he cannot answer that, the voice stops talking for a while.

Eventually, the sole door to the room clicks open. At first he thinks it must be people, his rescuers or his captors, but after several moments of staring at a cracked door, he realizes no one is coming through. He investigates and finds a small antechamber with a locked hatch on the other side. On the floor is a box containing packets of food and a cube covered in multicolored squares.

This is when he realizes he’s a prisoner.

\--

Eleven boxes of food later, the testing starts.

\--

His body does what it was always designed to do. It adapts. He loses a little muscle tone; his constant _need_ to move tapers off. He sleeps just fine, despite the fact that the lights in his cell never go off. He eats what they give him, despite knowing that some of it _must_ be drugged.

At one point he wakes to find his chest stitched back together with surgical thread, an ache in his ribs not unlike the time he broke three in a streetfight. He traces the lines of stitches and imagines himself butterflied open for a moment before it becomes too much.

The bruises and incisions and puncture marks fade as quickly as they ever did, and he’s not left with anything, not even the memory of how he got them.

\--

Three times he nearly escapes. Two of them are critical-thinking tests. The third is legitimate--he shakes off whatever drugs they’ve put in his food, breaks a guard’s nose, and makes it to another floor before they shoot him full of enough tranquilizers to drop a horse. The last thing he sees is boots running across carpet toward him. 

They’re more careful after that.

\--

 _Hello,_ someone says, _I know you._

Steve blinks owlishly, coming out of a haze; he tips his head on the medical bench he’s been laid out on to see another man on another bench, smiling absently. Steve feels vague confusion. He doesn’t know _him._ He’s not a guard or a doctor, at least not one he’s met before.

He feels sick. He usually feels sick after they drug him. He thinks they have to use too much because of the serum, that they have to half-kill him to make him manageable. Good. He hopes he never makes it easy for them.

The other man is looking at him, but seems to be having trouble focusing. He swallows once, twice, thick choking things, and rolls his head to stare at the ceiling instead. He’s older than Steve, greying a little at his temples. He keeps swallowing, compulsively, and Steve wonders if he’s feeling sick too. They’re dressed the same, soft and nondescript clothing, and stretching between their benches is a chain attached to each of them by a wristcuff.

This is the first time he’s met another prisoner.

Maybe it’s a trick.

He jerks against the chain and the other man whimpers--he’s drugged out of his mind, but apparently not so much that he doesn’t feel pain. Steve pauses, thinks. He then wraps a fist around the chain and tugs hard against his own wrist; metal squeals and he wrinkles his nose as the edge of the cuff bites into his skin. He does it again, a short sharp tug, and this time the metal links spring apart. He exhales slowly, flexing his fingers. 

He takes a moment to look around, to note the surroundings. They’re in a small room; the benches are the only furniture. The walls are smooth and uninterrupted except for a hatch door with no handle. Cameras are mounted on the ceiling. They’re alone. Sucking in a fortifying breath, he rolls off the bench and into a crouch.

Almost immediately he’s jabbed by a flying tranq dart from a heretofore hidden slit in the ceiling, and he stumbles and slumps against a wall before sliding to a seat. Men flood into the room, big men with rifles and a military air, followed by others who are dressed casually. A woman is there, in slacks, her hair tied back. His head lolls as he blinks up at her. He feels sick again. She crouches in front of him and takes his face in her hands, and his eyes go half-lidded at the warm touch. She tilts his head to and fro and nods.

She snaps her fingers at one of the men with rifles. _Get him back on the bench._

He’s bodily lifted and deposited back next to the prone form of the other man. He tries sitting up. He tries fighting back. He’s just pushed flat again. They slap another, slightly different cuff on him and replace the one on the other man’s wrist with the mate to his. He’s angry, and he tugs against it almost immediately, causing it to snap. The woman clucks and has more manacles brought in; this set is different from the other two. It covers most of his forearm and is filled with a soft gel-foam. The minute it clicks closed, something powers on and his muscles start contracting and spasming, low-level tremors that don’t _hurt_ so much as they make independent movement nearly impossible. The other man groans when his is locked on, a low keen that slowly increases in volume and pitch. The other people in the room retreat quickly, and Steve can hear the grind of tumblers falling into place on the hatch door.

The other man’s noises are a mirror to his own labored breathing as the current keeps running through him. He forces his right hand to move, a surprisingly difficult task, and tries prying at the cuff on his left arm, but every movement is weak and ineffectual. He tries beating it against the bench, but he can’t muster enough strength to even scratch the metal exterior.

He rolls, arm going taut as he encounters the weight of the other man through their cuffs. He pulls against it, body shaking. He wants to get to the floor, wants to try a different angle. But suddenly the sounds the other man is making change, go deep, urgent, and angry. As Steve watches, he curls around himself, head coming up to nearly meet his knees, contorting in a sharp way that Steve himself is incapable of. Something about it is _wrong,_ and Steve feels some animal instinct within him recoil, his gut telling him to be anywhere but here, chained to this man. He tugs and twists at his manacle, he scrabbles raw fingers against where it's sealed to his arm, but the cuff will not give. The other man screams, a drawn-out, begging _no_ becoming a horrible, inarticulate, inhuman noise. Steve pulls harder, tries to manipulate his body to get more leverage, panic setting in.

The other man begins to change. Steve’s transfixed, manacle forgotten, as he watches skin mottle, take on a green tinge that spreads like dye across muscles that boil up from nowhere, rending cloth. It’s a cancerous growth, hellishly fast, punctuated by screams that turn into deafening roars. The other man’s cuff buckles under the strain, then bursts open. A piece hits Steve in the face, though he barely registers the pain. He forces himself off the bench, and his shaking is not entirely due to the cuff still strapped around his arm.

The thing stumbles to huge feet and sways. It grabs the bench it had been lying on, ripping it free of the bolts holding it to the floor, and balls it before slamming it against a wall. Steve stumbles back in horror, then collapses as his leg muscles give out. The creature is nearly as tall as the ceiling and takes up most of the space in the tiny room. There is literally nowhere to go, and he cannot run anyway. 

The thing beats the wall a few more times, chipping away beige paint to reveal thick steel plating, then turns and seems to notice Steve for the first time. Lips pull back from blunt teeth as it roars at him. It lumbers forward jerkily, unsteady on its feet, and even if it _is_ still drugged, it’s more than capable of breaking him as utterly as it just did that bench.

He slides backward along the floor, weak and tiny movements, little rolls of his body. The thing digs fingers into Steve’s bench, warping metal, and slams it aside. Steve blinks blood from his eyes, hot thick trails from where the man’s cuff hit him, and realizes with sick certainty that he will not escape this creature, whatever it is.

He doesn’t, he doesn’t understand.

That is what he thinks as it advances on him, as it hauls him up by the front of his shirt. That is what he thinks as vents open in the ceiling, as a thick gas shoots into the room. His body goes slack, the aftershocks still rolling through him, and all he knows as the room blanks out is that he doesn’t _understand._

\--

Inexplicably, miraculously, he wakes up in his own cell, as whole and as hearty as can be expected. 

He staggers off of his bunk and vomits into the sink, nothing but bile.

They now use only the electrified cuffs on him when transporting him from lab to lab.

\--

He is on his back, looking at the ceiling, when the lights go out.

It’s the first time in months that he’s seen darkness. His mind stutters--has it been months? Years? He doesn’t know. He’s lost too many chunks of time to drugs; his internal clock has failed him for the first time since the serum entered his body. But it _feels_ like forever. He finds himself blind and disoriented, frozen still while he tries to find his bearings again. He doesn’t know how long he waits; he can count only in heartbeats.

A sliver of light explodes across his vision and an instant later something sharp hits him in the shoulder. He lurches to his feet and stumbles; a tranq dart sprouts from his shoulder. He crushes it in disgust. But he’s not fully incapacitated--they must need him mobile. Two men come at him now. They carry pistols and a tranq gun and a piece of cloth, and he skitters back from them like a scared animal might, into the darkest corner of the room.

Is this another test? It must be. It _must_ be.

They hood him as soon as they catch him, snaps metal around his wrists, and pull him through the antechamber into the hallway outside. They take a left. He's memorized the way to the labs, and this is wrong. In the distance is the rat-a-tat of gunfire and the wail of sirens; people are shouting and screaming. The floor beneath his bare feet goes from carpet to cold concrete. Suddenly he’s shoved to a raised floor; a body clambers in next to his and the immovable weight of a gun barrel is fitted to the dip where his neck meets his skull. The hollow thunk of a door shutting is followed by panicked whispering. An engine roars to life--they're in the back of a van. He’s being taken somewhere under crisis conditions; that means his captors aren’t being as careful as they should be. He breathes deeply and feels the nudge of the barrel against his bones; he forces himself to be still. It is the stillness that finally triggers the realization that he is not in the electrified cuffs. These men, they didn’t have his normal bonds; they’ve placed him in nothing but two pairs of ordinary handcuffs. Ever so slowly, he tests the strength; the gentle pressure causes tension distress. He can get these off. 

It’s like a slap. _He can get these off._

The ride is uneven, jolting. No roads, he thinks. He thinks he should be panicked, but all he feels is an empty determination. Perhaps it is a test, but he refuses to pass up an opportunity. There’s talking happening; he listens carefully. The person next to him is angry with the driver, hushed and vague words giving way to accusations. He hears _containment breach_ and _monster._ The firearm that has been pressed to his neck shifts, then vanishes as the voices rise. He lies very still, reaching out with his senses. Movement indicates that the person next to him is now half-standing. Steve can picture him, leaning forward to get into the driver's space.

This is it. Months or years or a lifetime--in this moment, it does not matter.

He snaps the chains between the cuffs in a single motion, ignoring the bloody bite of metal into the raw skin of his wrists. Without taking the hood off, he wraps hands around an ankle and jerks. A surprised shout turns into pain as he rolls his shoulder into the man’s knee, hyperextending it and causing a body to drop down on his. He grapples blindly for the firearm that he knows the man has, ignoring the sounds of surprise and outrage that his captors are making. 

The van jerks suddenly and violently, pitching him up against a wall hard enough that he sees galaxies within the dark universe that is the inside of the hood. The vehicle screeches under the strain, and in the next moment, the other man’s body slams into his. He doesn’t know if it’s the force of the turn or an attack, so he drives his elbow into whatever he can reach. There is unexpected give beneath the blow, and he feels the snapping of bones as the body turns heavy and slack. Before he can even wonder what he’s done, he hears a skittering slide across the floor--the firearm. He knows he has only seconds. He rips the hood away as the van screams to a halt; he's thrown against the driver's seat by inertia. He sees the gun slides under the other seat; he makes a desperate lunge for it as the driver twists around. 

Everything goes into microfocus, slows down. Becomes simple. It is the weight of a shield in his hand, it is the moment before a punch connects. His hand closes around a pistol. 

The click of a seatbelt and the click of a safety are simultaneous; the gunshot is deafening. The windshield shatters. Red and grey and foam paint the ceiling.

He stumbles outside afterward to find himself in a desert. He is a man alone in the desert with a stalled van and two bodies. It is night. There are no roads, just tire tracks across cracked earth leading...west? He thinks perhaps it’s west. On that horizon is a faint orange glow. Not the sun--it fluctuates like fire. 

Across the flat and barren earth, a far-away roar echoes.

The cool air helps flush the last of the tranquilizer’s effects from his body, and he leans against the van for a moment as he reorients himself. Though he isn’t cold, he feels naked in nothing but the soft cotton clothes he was kept in, so he pilfers a jacket and shoes from the man whose neck he inadvertently snapped. He checks the magazine of the pistol, notes the five remaining rounds, tucks it into the jacket’s pocket. He scours the van thoroughly, but finds no food, no water. Surely, he thinks, they must have been headed toward civilization. He doesn't like his chances to the west, feels nothing but unease as the flickering redness grows brighter, begins illuminating smoke. He follows the tracks back to where they began veering; he can see his own actions mirrored in the erratic swerving. When he has found the direction they had been traveling, he continues that way on foot.

\--

He has been walking for what he believes has been three hours--he was able to tell, long ago, by the rotation of the stars. He’s rusty; he feels out of place beneath the vast bowl of the heavens, but he thinks at least that it has been three hours. He’s exhausted, adrenaline draining away and leaving him as tired as ever he was before the serum. The only thing that keeps him moving is the freedom to do so.

He has been feeling tremors, distant explosions; he has been watching fire stain the night sky. As dawn washes out flame, black giving way to grey, though, the ground shakes in a more immediate way. He swings around and looks--against the royal blue of the western sky, a thick column of smoke looms. He licks dry lips. The ground shakes in a steady, pounding rhythm. Like footsteps.

He is a man alone in the desert. He is a man with a gun and five bullets. He is a man in stolen shoes that do not fit. He crouches behind brush and wills himself invisible.

The monster finds him anyway.

It lopes to a stop ten yards out, breathing heavily. It is huge, green, and naked. He did not--could not--forget, but the sight of it still shocks him. This time, it’s filthy. Thickening blood coats its hands, its forearms, its feet; soot and ash streak its skin.

He feels that focus come back, push aside exhaustion.

He is a man with a gun and five bullets, but he is a man who remembers what came before the monster. He doesn’t fire. He crouches and he is not afraid. He thinks that perhaps they have taken that from him. He does not want to die, but he is not afraid.

A breath, two, three. The monster looks confused, tired. With a low, carrying sound, its eyes roll back in its head, whites showing blindly. It convulses, staggers, and falls. Bones crack, muscles melt; it implodes or it decays--Steve could not say which. At the end, the other man kneels on parched earth. He looks at Steve again, haggard, drawn, worse for the comparison to what he just was. He is covered in blood and ash; his skin is thick with it.

 _I know you,_ he says. He looks confused and ill.

At last he slumps sideways, unconscious. Only then does Steve move. He crouches above the prone body for a moment, the rising sun warm on his back. Were they prisoners together and nothing more, both taking advantage of some catastrophic failure of their captors’ system? Or does he owe his freedom to the monster? He still doesn’t understand, and it sits like a cold stone in his stomach.

He could leave the man here, naked and alone and unprotected. It is the smart thing to do. It is the rational thing to do.

Forever ago, a lifetime ago, he made a promise to be a good man.

Steve shrugs out of his jacket, wraps the man, picks him up.

He keeps walking, into the unknown.


End file.
